John Graham-Cumming

POPFile v1.0.1 was released today; this is the first ever POPFile release that I didn't do. POPFile is now being managed by a core team of developers: Manni Heumann (in Germany), Brian Smith (in the UK), me (in France), Joseph Connors (in the US) and Naoki Iimura (in Japan). A truly international effort. The actual release binaries were built by Brian Smith who, for a long time, has been the installer guru.

This release contains minor feature improvements and a number of bug fixes. Some of the bugs fixes were for annoying bugs that showed up only occasionally: that makes it a worthwhile upgrade.

Since I pulled back from being involved in every detail of POPFile's evolution the core team has been liberated to work on the project. v1.0.1 is their first release, and it is minor, but much greater things are coming:

1. A native Mac installer

2. A SOHO version of POPFile. Some time ago I did most, but not all, of the work to make a multi-user version of POPFile. That work is be…

A story appeared on Slashdot about a mysterious fax received at Fermilab written in an unknown code. The full story is here. I looked at it and immediately noticed a few things:

1. The first part looked like ternary (base 3) with digits 1 (|), 2(||) and 3(|||).

2. The last part looked like binary with digits 1(|) and 2(||)

3. The middle bit looked like either a weird substitution code, or I wondered if it might be machine code.

4. In the last part the digit 2 (||) never occurs more than once, perhaps it was actually a separator and the last part is not binary.

The first step was to convert the bars into numbers. Here's a copy of my marked up print out:



The first part has the numbers (or at least I thought):

323233331112132
333231322123312
111331132312233
333212123213113
311333313331111
211333323232211
232313331121231
33231312

Noticing this had 113 digits (which is a prime number) I went off on a wild goose chase around primes, and then around the interpretation of this number in hexadecimal …

Shortly after I announced that I was getting out of anti-spam the folks at Virus Bulletin contacted me about taking over The Spammers' Compendium. I was delighted.

Today the transfer is complete and the new home is here. It will be maintained and updated by Virus Bulletin. Please send submissions to them.